William B. Cassidy, Senior Editor | Jan 05, 2012 4:46PM EST
YRC Worldwide is selling the former Akron headquarters of Roadway and may eliminate up to 100 jobs in the Ohio city, according to the Akron Beacon Journal.
The Gorge Boulevard building that housed Roadway, once one of the largest less-than-truckload carriers in the country, will be sold to an industrial developer. The $4.3 billion LTL giant put the property on the block in 2009 and said last year it would cut about 80 jobs at the building Roadway occupied for decades.
Roadway was merged with Yellow Transportation in 2009 to form YRC, six years after YRC’s predecessor Yellow purchased Roadway in a $1.1 billion deal. Some Akron employees will be transferred to nearby YRC terminals and others would be offered jobs out of state, the ABJ reported.
The sale of the Gorge Boulevard building comes as YRC Worldwide’s new management, led by CEO James Welch, struggles to rebuild the LTL operator. YRC Worldwide lost more than $2.5 billion between 2006 and 2010, and lost $120 million in the third quarter of 2011 after a $500 million restructuring.
Welch named Jeff Rogers, former president of regional LTL subsidiary Holland, president of YRC in September. Together, they’ve been pruning operations. Rogers is cutting away layers of management, consolidating sales and operations and examining the national LTL carrier’s network of about 300 terminals.
“I think we may still have too much infrastructure, too much network, for the bills we’re handling,” Rogers said in an interview in November.
YRC Worldwide also sold its truckload unit, Glen Moore, to Celadon Group in December, tightening its focus on its core LTL operations.
Contact William B. Cassidy at wcassidy@joc.com. Follow him on Twitter at @wbcassidy_joc